The present disclosure relates generally to methods for producing nanostructures, and more specifically, to a self-assembly method for producing porphyrin nanostructures.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Markets for certain areas of technology, such as electronics (e.g., computers, cellular phones, televisions), have benefited from technologies that allow the production of certain components at smaller scales. For example, the production of smaller electrical components allows an overall reduction in the size of electrical consumer products, a decrease in the amount of materials required for, and therefore the cost of, manufacturing such products, and an overall increase in capability (e.g., computing power) of the product. In typical manufacturing processes, small materials are produced from larger materials, which may be considered a top-down approach. Lithography, a process used to produce the millions of transistors in a computer processor, is one example. Unfortunately, present technologies, such as lithography, have begun to reach their limit to produce structures smaller than the microscale, such as on the nanometer scale.
Nanostructures, i.e., structures having at least one dimension less than about 1 micron, have potential application in a variety of areas such as nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, optics, sensors, catalysis, energy harvesting, bioengineering, and others. Moreover, materials can exhibit unique properties at the nanoscale that diminish at larger sizes. For example, nanostructures may be synthesized to have a wide variety of advantageous properties, such as electrical conductance, semi-conductance, resistivity, optical activity, optically-induced conductance, molecular recognition, catalytic activity, and so on that would otherwise not be present. In a general sense, these properties of nanostructures may be reminiscent of their single molecule counterparts, may result from a collective behavior of a larger assembled structure, or both.
In light of their unique properties and possible integration into existing technologies, it is widely recognized that there is a considerable need to produce nanoscale materials. An alternative approach to the top-down manufacturing techniques mentioned above is the bottom-up approach, where large structures are built from single molecules. Bottom-up approaches can be desirable when one or more dimensions of a nanostructure is tunable to obtain a particular benefit, or when structures are desired on a scale that is unreachable by other techniques. For example, the optical, electrical, chemical and/or other properties of nanostructures may be tuned by manipulating one or more of the nanostructure's dimensions, such as the length, diameter, and/or thickness of the nanostructure, as well as the chemical identity of the single molecules from which the nanostructure is formed. Moreover, bottom-up synthetic approaches can produce structures having a scale as small as a few angstroms (10−10 m), or one ten-thousandth of the width of a human hair.
Molecular self-assembly is one example of a bottom-up approach for producing nanostructures. Synthetic self assembly methods, in a similar manner to biological systems, use one or more non-covalent interactions such as van der Waals forces, hydrogen bonding, aromatic π-π stacking, and axial coordination to produce macromolecules from single molecules. However, unlike traditional synthetic methods where individual bonds can be formed and broken to control the exact molecular structure of a product, it can be difficult to predict and control the structure that is formed from a self-assembly process. Accordingly, there is a need for a method of self-assembly that is able to control the size and morphology of generated nanostructures.